The removal of glued down carpeting has often typically required human laborers to physically peel up the carpeting with either their hands or some hand tools, such as pry bars, and screw drivers, etc. In addition, the laborer must then pull and rip the carpeting out which is very difficult since they often must stand on the actual carpeting they are removing. The hand tools used can often damage the underlying floor beneath the carpet which will require additional time and expense to fix. Often physical injuries such as wrenched backs, and torn up hands result from such removal techniques. In addition, this time consuming work will often takes hours if not days to accomplish for large amounts of spaces and buildings, which adds additional expense.
Devices have been attempted over the years to try to remove carpeting but still have problems of their own. See for example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,332,371 to Bell et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 4,533,118 to Thomas et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 4,560,146 to Thomas et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 4,906,323 to Thomas; U.S. Pat. No. 5,387,308 to Heavrin; U.S. Pat. No. 5,454,899 to Glenn et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,720,844 to Hanson; U.S. Pat. No. 5,909,868 to Galella; U.S. Pat. No. 6,004,426 to Johnson; U.S. Pat. No. 7,032,886 to Kraft.
Thomas '323, Heavrin '308, Hanson '844, and Gaiella '868 each require a laborer having to physically grip tools to remove the carpeting, which would be undesirable for being at least time consuming and labor intensive.
Bell '371, Thomas '118, Thomas '146, Kraft '886, and Johnson '426 have automated machines that generally require an operator be adjacent to the machine for operate, and the machine is placed directly on the carpet. Thus, the machines would generally need to be constantly moved about so that the carpet under the machines is removed. Also, some of these machines require anchoring through the carpeting which could be difficult to achieve and could potentially damage the sub floor under the carpeting. Additionally, many of these machines can require two or more persons to operate, and the machines can cost in the thousands of dollars, which makes them further undesirable to use.
Thus, the need exists for solutions to the above problems with the prior art.